A giant panda eats bamboo shoots at the giant panda research base in Chengdu, China. Giant pandas are to return to the UK for the first time in 17 years after an agreement was signed with China this week

Larch trees that are being felled at the National Trust's Staple plantation on the Quantock Hills near Minehead, England. Thousands of infected larch trees are being felled at the woodland to try to halt the spread of the deadly disease known as sudden oak death. The airborne disease, originally from the US and which can jump species, is spreading so fast some commentators are calling it the 'foot and mouth' of trees

Wallabies find dry ground after Charlie's Creek reached its peak for a second time in January in Chinchilla, Queensland, Australia. Sixteen people have been confirmed dead and 53 are still missing after devastating floods in the Lockyer valley. Evacuations took place this week in several towns and suburbs in and around the state capital of Brisbane as the waters surged downstream. The Queensland premier, Anna Bligh, referred to the flood crisis as the worst natural disaster the state had experienced and warned that clean-up and rebuilding costs could reach an estimated A$5bn (£3.1bn)

Bicyclus anynana butterflies mating. Left: dry season female. Right: wet season male. The way male and female butterflies relate to one another depends on the weather they experience as they mature to adults

A king penguin with a tracking band on its flipper walking among other adults and juveniles on the sub-Antarctic island of Crozet. Penguin researchers put metal bands on the seabirds' flippers to track them. But the decade-long survival rate for banded king penguins is 16% lower than penguins who don't have metal trackers, according to a new study published in the journal Nature

Pepe the spider monkey, pictured here at an animal sanctuary in the heart of the Amazon basin in Bolivia, was orphaned at three days old. His mother was killed by poachers who hunt the species for their meat, which is considered a delicacy

The body of a baby elephant drowned in heavy flood waters hangs from a tree on 13 January 2011 in the north-central Sri Lankan region of Habarana. Local officials believe the baby elephant may have drowned three days earlier when flood waters rose more than 18 feet from the Gal Oya River. Heavy monsoon rains have driven more than 1 million people out of their homes in the central, north-central and eastern regions of Sri Lanka in the past week

The carcass of a red-winged blackbird from Beebe, Arkansas, is examined by a US Geological Survey wildlife pathologist. Hundreds of blackbirds fell from sky over Louisiana, days after similar phenomenon in neighbouring Arkansas

One of the world's rarest wild cats spotted in Malaysian Borneo. The Bornean bay cat, a long-tailed reddish or grey feline the size of a large domestic cat, was sighted in the northern highlands of Malaysia's Sarawak state, the forest department said